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The War of the Lamb: The Ethics of Nonviolence and Peacemaking
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Item Description...
John Howard Yoder was one of the major theologians of the late twentieth century. Before his death, he planned the essays and structure of this book, which he intended to be his last work. Now two leading interpreters of Yoder bring that work to fruition. The book is divided into three sections: pacifism, just war theory, and just peacemaking theory. The volume crystallizes Yoder's argument that his proposed ethics is not sectarian and a matter of withdrawal. He also clearly argues that Christian just war and Christian pacifist traditions are basically compatible--and more specifically, that the Christian just war tradition itself presumes against all violence. |
Item Specifications...
Pages 230
Dimensions: Length: 0.75" Width: 6.25" Height: 9.5"
Weight: 0.75 lbs.
Binding Softcover
Release Date Dec 1, 2009
Publisher Brazos Press
ISBN 1587432609
EAN 9781587432606
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Availability 6 units.
Availability accurate as of May 26, 2012 01:33.
Usually ships within one to two business days from La Vergne, TN.
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Reviews - What do our customers think?
 | The Cruciform Lifestyle and its "Real World" Impact Jan 10, 2010 |
A friend gave me this book, and I hungrily devoured its nourishing contents. I often use a red pen to underline and notate key phrases in my reading. Thumbing through my just-finished copy, "I see red." Lots of red! Along with everything else I've ever read by John Howard Yoder, these posthumously published essays and transcribed lectures are concise, well-argued, theologically grounded, and convincing. Glen Stassen, Mark Thiessan Nation, and Matt Hamsher as editors have compiled a collection of Yoder's ethics of nonviolence in which the component chapters build nicely upon one another in an overlapping way. I found the end-notes absorbing, too, my only quibble being that I prefer footnotes so as not to be flipping pages back and forth. I should say at the outset that Yoder was outlining this projected volume in the months leading up to his unexpected death in 1997, a project that Stassen was privy to in discussions with Yoder.
"The War of the Lamb" as a term derives from numerous references in the Book of Revelation. The power of God is revealed definitively through Jesus, and that power is love that willingly suffers violence to self rather than inflicting violence on others. This is the mystery and power of the cross that confounds the logic that the so-called "real world" operates upon. The cruciform way of Jesus, as like the "weakness and vulnerability" of a lamb, actually becomes a conquering power as followers actualize this redemptive truth (p. 177). Yoder writes, "Suffering love is not right because it "works" in any calculable short-run way (although it often does!). It is right because it goes with the grain of the universe, and that is why in the long run nothing else will work" (p. 62).
Yoder is identified as a premier pacifist theologian and ethicist. His faith in God as revealed in Jesus Christ was the fountain from which his ethic flowed. Pacifism is not an absolute rule or theoretical ideology but rather an outcome of "a converted life in Christ that subsumes and often changes every `natural pattern' of behavior" (p. 117).
Yoder argues with Just War Theory in several sections of the book. The more recent Just War apologists take the line of Ernst Troeltsch and the Niebuhr brothers, Reinhold and H. Richard. Pacifists are dismissed as irrelevant and ineffective in combating and controlling evil in "the real world." Yoder counters with examples such as the nonviolent movements led by Gandhi and King. Yoder's key vindication point is faith in the nonviolent crucified Christ who is resurrected. Rather than withdrawing from the evils that plague this planet, followers of Jesus confront evil. After all, the "War of the Lamb" is a war. But not retaliatory. Use of the means of evil negates good ends.
Yoder also takes on the Just War Theory as faulty due to its poor track record. Religious bodies always seem to justify a nation's drum beats for the newest war, and war conduct always seems to exceed just war boundaries. I wonder if he had lived longer what Yoder would say to the fact that most major Christian denominations opposed invading Iraq in 2003 as unjust. President George W. Bush, a Methodist, refused to meet with his own denomination's bishops who wanted to caution him on Just War principles. Perhaps Yoder's several decades of hammering at Just War Theory inconsistencies is having some effect. At another level, I would have liked Yoder to comment as to whether domestic police use or threat of violence is an effective application of Just War principles.
Several chapters deal with conflict resolution and conflict management. The key for handling conflict in congregations is covenant. "My brother or sister and I can be reconciled partly because we recognize an authority sovereign over both of us. We are not simply negotiating a middle position between the two of us, to which we can each move without too much loss of face....we study together whether there is a truth bigger than both of us, under which we must meet, whatever the change it demands of us" (p. 144). As for conflict in society, the Christian employs three attitudes. Christians are to love their enemies as they do their friends...because it is what their Father does" (p. 147). The second trait is servanthood, because Jesus served rather than lorded over people. Jesus "did not avoid conflict. In fact, he sometimes even provoked it....[yet] he renounced, intentionally and not merely out of weakness, the temptation to impose his will upon others through superior power" (p. 147). The third Christian trait is the "willingness to suffer the full costs of faithfulness in a society that turns its hostility upon them..." (p. 147).
As a reservist with Christian Peacemaker Teams as well as an environmental activist opposing mountaintop removal, I was especially interested in the Chapter, "The Church and Change. Yoder discusses nonviolent direct action, defined as "a form of involvement to maintain a broad range of pressure within the existing order at the same time that one seeks to replace it" (p. 156). Replace it, Yoder says, with a more just alternative. Yoder approvingly quotes comments of the South African Council of Churches, "To affirm that one's oppressor is a child of God is one of the least frequent and most profound expressions of commitment to the crucified Christ as Lord and as hope" (p. 162).
I was heartened to see Yoder approvingly refer to cultural anthropologist Rene Girard in two of the chapters. Girard posits scapegoat violence as the origin of social order, culture, and religion. Christianity, however, has a destabilizing effect upon violent social ordering due to its sympathy and advocacy for the victim.
Yoder's last chapter ends in a struggle to understand why the wicked "really prosper" while justice seems out of reach. "Nevertheless: people who believe in the resurrection are responsible, on the grounds of that faith context, to go through life believing that problems can be solved for which the solution is not yet evident" (p. 198). Such is the Christian grace of Hope that precipitates the faith journey.
I will refer to my copy of this book often.
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